SLIDESHOW: Building the Mac Office

Apple's all-in-one desktop PC, the iMac, will be the workhorse of your new office. It has plenty of power for standard office tasks and comes in a range of sizes and prices to fit the needs of different staff members. Set the low-demand users up with the $1,199 20-inch model with a 2.0 GHz Intel Core Duo chip and a 250 GB hard drive, and give the power users who run several applications at once the $2,299 24-inch model with a 1920-x-1200 display, a 2.8 GHz chip, and a 500 GB hard drive. Apple also offers an assortment of configure-to-order options for each model that raise their capabilities -- and, of course, their price. All but the highest-end model come with only 1 GB of RAM, though, so the first thing you want to do is to at least double that. But don't order the extra RAM from Apple -- Apple memory is notoriously overpriced. Buy it from someplace like Kingston or Other World Computing and put it in yourself. iMac memory gets installed behind a little door in the bottom. It's the easiest upgrade you'll ever make.

A word about the Mac mini: We'd have recommended this small, quiet Mac for low-demand users except for the widespread rumors that it may soon be taken out of the Mac lineup. We'd wait a few months to see what, if anything, replaces it (or if it gets upgraded and stays around) before going that route.